The Jennifer Fenton led Manhattan Beach Unified School District board has garnered the unwanted attention of the national conversative news outlet RedState. Her and the board’s attempts to force Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its doppelganger EDSJI (Equity, Diversity, Social Justice, and Inclusion) into the curriculum against the parents’ wishes have garnered comparisons to the controversy plagued Loudoun County School Board in Virginia. Like the MCUSD, that school board banned in person meetings because of open hostility to the actions of the school board regarding then implementation of CRT in classrooms.
That’s the same school board also allegedly sandbagged sexual assault charges, hiding them from parents. The charges stem from an incident regarding a “transgender” student sexually assaulted two underage girls in the girls’ bathroom. A Virginia juvenile court judge ruled Monday that there was sufficient evidence to sustain charges in the case. The finding is equivalent to a guilty charge in other courts.
“Parents are right to be concerned about the divisiveness surrounding CRT, as well as the well-documented hostility and dismissiveness to parental concerns by school boards across the country” Jennifer Oliver O’Connell wrote in Red State on 21 Oct 2021. She continued elsewhere in the article:
“As a Black communicator, it seems that the people who are crying for diversity and inclusion rarely reflect these so-called values. If MBUSD Board is truly concerned about this, one would think they would look in the mirror. The School Board could be the cast of a new reality show called, 5 Woke Crackers. Three blonde, white women, one brunette, and one white, “non-binary” biological male does not a diverse or inclusive board make. I fail to understand how you can lead in what you do not embody.”
Apparently clueless about the increased national attention, Fenton and the MBUSC board also cancelled an in-person “workshop” scheduled for the 20th of October, opting instead for a Zoom conference. The few parents that did “attend” the workshop were opposed to the board’s attempts to ram EDSJI into the curriculum with parents’ approval.
